Ideas and Insight supporting all stages of Drug Discovery & Development

Harpreet Shah

About the author:
Being an ex-researcher to an ex-customer support executive, I have had my feet inside the shoes of our customers. As an Embase Solution Marketer at Elsevier, I communicate this customer-insight to drive product strategy and bring the value back to our customers. With so much of innovation going around in the field of biomedical research, keeping myself abreast the latest technologies, challenges and needs of the society; sharing my thoughts on the same is what I aim from my blogposts. Feel free to connect with me at LinkedIn.

Posts by Harpreet Shah

Pharma research for rare disease is challenging because of
insufficient patient populations available for clinical trials, and also because
the investment returns are marginal. Thus, grey literature is an important
source of information for rare disease research—and, fortunately, grey
literature data is increasingly being recognized as highly valuable to the
scientific community.

With the continued fatal spread of COVID-19 and no cure at hand, Chinese doctors are looking to pharmaceutical drugs and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) alike to explore possibilities for treatment as well as prevention. According to Nature, traditional therapies are included among the many clinical trials that are running or pending in China right now. But there is concern that rigorous standards need to be set, to ensure the trial results can be trusted.

A fruitful collaboration between Elsevier and Beijing University of Chinese Medicine (BUCM) resulted in Embase adding a new Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) taxonomy to its thesaurus tool Emtree in January 2020. At the same time as the release, BUCM held an evidence-based medicine training and seminar in Beijing to help promote the concept of evidence-based medicine. Elsevier was a sponsor of the event, and was proud to have our own Dr. Iveta Petrova, Embase Lead Product Manager, there to introduce the TCM addition to Emtree.

Systematic review of the available literature from clinical trials is important for collecting evidence for existing and new patient care practices. With the ever-increasing amount of literature around this, it becomes important to design literature searches that ensure no important safety signal is missed.